Treason

“I have been called traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. I was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, “Proffy is a low-down traitor.” The word shafel, “low-down,” raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word “low-down”? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?”

This is the start of the novel Panther in the Basement, by Jewish writer, Nobel Prize of Literature Amos Oz. In that novel, the main subject seems to be treason, or at least the novel tries to go over treason, but it really has to do with tolerance. It tells the story of a young Jewish from Israel under the British occupation who makes friends with an officer of the invading country. This friendship arises after Profi is detained by Lieutenant Dunlop after the curfew and he takes him to his family without other repercussions. They get, as they are walking home, to a tacit agreement: the Jew will teach Hebrew to the soldier and the soldier will teach English to the teenager. The adolescent belongs to a sort of a Resistance organization with two of his best childhood friends and, when he himself believes he is betraying them decides to tell them he is infiltrating in the enemy lines. His friends question that relationship, and he himself starts questioning if he is a traitor.

I read this novel with double satisfaction. First because it is written with great mastery and at the same time simplicity, and every time I finished reading a chapter I said to myself: this guy deserves the Nobel prize for sure. Secondly, because all the time I was thinking about treason and its implications in Cuba. Or at least what is understood by treason in our country, and I came to the conclusion that, once again, as usual, we are facing a disruption of concepts. I would prefer to confine myself to how this phenomenon behaves in the intellectual world and if I could, I would limit myself to literature, because if you are going to talk or write about treason in Cuba you have to start talking about the “Ochoa affair”, and even farther back, and that is too much tricky. I will write about what I saw and know, and beyond treason, I want to comment about the intolerance and arbitrariness at the time of deciding who betrays and who does not, because we know WHAT is betrayed.

“Epur si muove”, muttered Galileo Galileo in front of the Inquisition after admitting that the earth was not round. He had become a heretic. And what else is a heretic but a traitor? Centuries later, the history would repeat itself in our Island when Heberto Padilla had to repent and criticize himself for the only crime of having published a book that, after so many years, has revealed itself as an innocent book in the context of Cuban poetry within the Revolution. But back then it was dangerous that someone could write, say, think things like that. And it was more dangerous if, besides, the book was well received by a jury of one of the most prestigious contests of the country (UNEAC). And it already turned into a State matter if it was awarded and published. Padilla had been put into prison for writing a book and that would serve as an example for the rest of the Cuban intellectuals and it is represented an idea of what was the fate of the artistic-literary creation of the rising nation.

Back in 1999, with the idea of making up an anthology of poetry with the tree as subject, project I abandoned before compiling the first part, I was rummaging in the shelves of the Provincial Library José Martí, in Las Tunas, and I found (what a surprise!) three copies of Fuera de juego (Out of the Game), the alluded poetry book. In the first page, a green-blue stamp: CLOSED-DOWN. That was the word I least expected. CENSORED would have been better, because who can close a book down. The three copies were new, as if recently published, just with that half-yellow color due to humidity and dust, but they were virgin to readers. I asked a friend (of course one of those not interested in literature) to steal them for me. And I kept them in my room until one day I sold them together with a cheap edition of Cecilia Valdés. I repented after that, but money came at just the right time and I have never been he who treasures books.

The first time I read that book I did not even enjoy it too much, just thinking about what had turned it into a worshipped object. Padilla had betrayed the ideals of the Homeland. And since that moment I worried about treason. In Las Tunas I used to look at Guillermo Vidal, my literary father, and I could not understand why they had expelled him from the Pedagogical University, why the cultural (and not cultural) authorities of the province stared at him as if he was a dangerous weirdo. Guillermo Vidal was also a traitor. Despite he never wanted to abandon Las Tunas and died in that place he was, for the officer corps, a traitor.

But how do we know that a writer is a traitor? In the 70s, specifically in 1971, when the Congress of Education and Culture was held, there was a system called “parametración”, by means of which the cultural (and not cultural) authorities established what writers could pass through the filter, depending on the amount of impurities they had (sexual, religious preferences, political position and even relations with foreigners or relatives living outside the Island). That is why last year hundreds of writers and artists in Cuba and beyond raised their voices when the national television interviewed two of the more sinister characters of that time: Papito Seguera, who recently passed away, and Luis Pavón. Looks like the ones who suffered the system of “parametración” and those who feel they can be in the eye of the beholder got scared when they saw reviving those two gentlemen. After all the electronic scandal nothing really happened. Nevertheless, there are several questions still hovering over the rarefied national air: is there still a system of “parametración” in Cuba? Who is sin-free according to the Revolutionary Creed? How do we know now who is a traitor and who is not?

And I do not really know why I speak of writers, when actually I should be speaking of any kind of professionals who are not allowed to go to the Island just because the concept of treason there responds to mechanisms aloof from sanity and good sense. The case of writers is not the most frequent. I would be sinning if I thought it was. The invisibility where we have always been hidden has saved us a bit from the media rejection that the authorities propel. The most underprivileged have been the sportsmen, actors, musicians and doctors, but above all the first ones. Just as soon as a sportsman leaves the country, and as soon as they know people know, they read a note (published next day in the newspapers) on television announcing that the sportsman defected, misled by the mermaid chants, etcetera, etcetera… Sportsmen, and ballet dancers and actors and a long list, and even politicians, who, after having “served” blindly are dismissed before the minimum doubt, before the slightest shadow of treason. In that case, as in others, to treason is to contradict or swim against the leaders. The list has just grown longer. Roma pays his traitors but despises them. After having served for so many years now they are treated as unworthy and ambitious. Nobody knows for sure what these ministers have done to be dismissed just like that. Maybe they went against the Revolutionary principles they have instilled in us since we were born and that nobody carries out, because you have to be perfect. “Pioneros por el Comunismo. ¡Seremos como el Che!” (Pioneers, for the Communism, we will be like Che!), that is an almost suicide slogan I had to hear from my goddaughter the day she was given the pañoleta.

In Cuba you can commit mistakes, but you can not rectify. Boxers Erislandy Lara and Guillermo Rigondeaux, in an almost childish gesture, repented when they were about to defect in Brazil and went back to Cuba. They knew they would be punished, but they, I repeat, childishly, thought the authorities would have let them keep on fighting but it was not like that. And so, one by one, escaped when they realized pardon was not ever coming for them. Even Rigondeaux waited a little longer and not even his reference as the best world amateur boxer was enough.

I see that Beckham plays in the team he wants and in his country the Prime Minister or the Queen consider him a traitor. Or Pau Gasol in Spain; nor the Venezuelan, Dominican or Puerto Rican baseball players in their countries. And I see, when I walk by the streets of Brampton and Toronto, hundreds of immigrants and I wonder if they are considered traitors in their countries. Me, myself, before coming to Canada, despite I was leaving Cuba via a very legal way, I was questioning myself if I was betraying something. And the verb “betray”, whatever its conjugation is, sounds strong, terrible, painful, despicable.

Amos Oz in Against Fanaticism, a book that gathers three conferences about that subject, says that the traitor is “he who changes at the eyes of those who hate to change and can not conceive change at all, in spite of they always want to change you. In other words, traitor, in the eyes of the fanatic, is anything who changes (…) Not becoming a fanatic means, to a certain extent and someway, becoming a traitor in the eyes of the fanatic.”

More than enough for me.